The Evolution of Human Intelligence: Why It Matters and What It Teaches Us About Ourselves, Neuroscience, and AI

In this talk, Bennett will review the research and key conclusions in his new book A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. Despite centuries of effort, we still do not understand how the human brain works. The brain is full of messy redundancy that makes it difficult to reverse engineer by trying to decompose brain structures into various functions. Bennett will propose an alternative approach for reverse engineering the algorithms in the human brain: instead of trying to decompose the algorithms within the modern human brain, we can track the key evolutionary breakthroughs through which the modern human brain emerged. This gives us a new tool in our toolbox for trying to interpret many perplexing aspects of human intelligence. Bennett proposes that human brain evolution can be approximated as the culmination of five algorithmic breakthroughs.